Tales From Sol
by Drawlords
Summary: A continuing anthology of short stories from across the world of Destiny, from the furthest reaches of the solar systems to the most intimate depths of Earth, featuring fan favourites and original characters alike.
1. Lament of the Titan Anjzel

We should never have gone to Pluto.

The Dark is eating us. Wisps of phantoms, of memories carried on the broken wings of dead things run through us like spears. My barrier falters against the onslaught. My vision's blurry and hazy, no more than a tunnel on Vren's prone form. He's gone, I think. His ghost is a spindle of crushed metal next to him.

They won't stop whispering. Nothings and somethings wriggling in my inner ear. I can save them. A claw made of shadow slams against my shield and it throws me to a knee. The attack rocks my heart, like the claw's wrapping its talons around it and squeezing it into a singularity.

Bashir's body stinks of maggot-ridden meat. On one of our expeditions to Venus he waltzed out of a ruin with a big crate in his arms. "Golden Age gourmet," he'd said, smile beaming. We'd eaten it under green rains and stories. There are no stories here, not anymore. His half-devoured face stares into the Deep.

It's crushing me, grinding me underfoot. I'm an ant, intruding on a sacred place I - we - are undeserving of. My light is no more than a flickering spark in a sea of tar, and it is being swallowed. The shield flickers and cracks. Red faces collide with the purple. Their shadowed mouths move, but I can't hear them. Only the whispers, nothing but the whispers. Tregarin would have made a joke by now, but Tregarin is out there, which means Tregarin no longer exists.

Let go.

I'm crying. Little rivulets steaming on my sunken cheeks. It was my idea.

"Remus," I say, and the little flying pyramid appears, eye downcast, "I'm sorry."

My arms drop. The shield vanishes. The Dark swallows us whole.

And then, I'm awake.

Awake before the apparition of a veiled woman twenty feet tall. "Remus?" I say, and all I get in response is silence. The hallway leading from the woman is framed in an angelic white light. It beckons me.

I follow.

Like I'm in a dream, there seems to be no respect for time in this place. For an hour I pass shattered halls filled with the corpses of Hive, the mummified bones of wizards and knights hoisted like trophies on a hunter's wall. For a minute, I climb a staircase a million steps tall, half-shadows of the long dead watching from above. For a day, I journey across the ice moon of a neutron star.

Vren, Bashir, and Tregarin return to me. They walk with me with shrouded faces and silent words but they are company all the same. They perch in that part of my mind I feel but never see, that I witness, but never hear. They carve out a part of me and become me. They whisper the nothings and the somethings. We are the nothings and the somethings.

The Traveler seems so very far away.

On the last day - we do not know how it is the last day, only that it is - the light guides us back to the veiled woman, and at her base are twin shadows of quasars. Two titans, awaiting the third.

"It is time," says Saint-14, and we are the bulwark.

"Be brave," says Wei Ning, and we are the sword.

I step between them, and they take my hands in theirs. The light recedes. It shows me the truth and it hurts make it stop there is something inside me _kill me please-_

And then the light returns. A pyramid comes with it.

We are bear witness to the exhumed heart of divinity, and it is _magnificent._


	2. A Little Thing Called Hope

In the depths of the Hellmouth, the Hive wages a genocide on life. Wizards toil with ashen flesh and rotted minds to form hulking, mindless monstrosities in the name of their gods; knights sharpen infinitely dripping bone blades in the hopes of cutting down a Guardian in the image of Crota; acolytes witness their betters, thinking they too can ascend, yet cowering when such betters turn their eyes upon them; and the thralls, desperate, starving, dying, tear each other apart by the millions for a single mote of the tithe.

Makara-2 knows them well, for Makara-2 has killed them well.

Near the Chamber of Night, the red iron of the Scarlet Keep intrudes on the organic steel blight of the Hive. It is infection on infection, corruption on corruption, so virulent it can't help but cannabilise itself. Makara-2 drags an acolyte into the dark. They like to patrol, these ones, and she needs to get to the end of the chamber where old bones lie. She flicks the poison blood off her knife onto a red wall, and the neon illuminates a plunder so unexpected she can't help but stop and stare.

In the floor's cracks weeds and fungi are growing, and when she inches close they blink with the sun's light in response. A Knight rumbles by, unaware of the enemy.

"Caesar." Her ghost appears, and scans the flora without a word.

"Huh," he says, "it's clean."

The fungi bobs in place like it's pleased to hear the news.

She rubs one of the stalks and coats her fingers in plant fibre. "How?"

"Beats me. It shouldn't even exist all the way down here, or, y'know, on the Moon."

Peculiar, that nature has spread its wings to places so plagued space-time itself morphs into malformed shapes of hatred and death. By what right can it grow here when a light-imbued humanity couldn't? She plucks out a thread of a weed, Ikora Rey will want to see this for her-

On the tip of her rifle's barrel, there sits a moth.

A living, breathing, wing-fluttering moth. In the shadows of the Hive's deepest caverns, illuminated only by drying blood. "Hey, you," Makara says, and proffers it her fibre caked finger. "Aren't you beautiful?"

The moth takes the offer. It's like air given form has settled where her fingertip would be were she human. The small thing laps up the fibre, delicious sustenance all for free. The sensation tickles.

"It can't be real," Caesar says, his inner machine whirring in suspicion.

"Why not?"

"Doesn't make sense."

The moth glows with the same sunlight as the fungus. "Since when has the Hive ever made sense?"

"Fair, but why would they let this live?" He hovers over the moth, an overprotective parent.

"They aren't, because they don't know it exists." Caesar hums. He's unconvinced. "Think. It's growing in the darkest corner it can. It's hiding and it's not being found."

"It will."

"Maybe. Yes. Then it will grow again, and every time the Hive rips it out, the last seed they didn't catch will flourish."

The moth lifts up from Makara's finger and drifts back to the fungi. To be so unperturbed.

"How do you know they won't catch it?"

Makara-2 shrugs. "I don't. I just like to have hope."

Caesar hums, satisfied, and evaporates back into the ether.

From the hellspawn realms they crawl from, to the darkest holes buried in Luna, and all the way to the surface of Mars, the Hive wages a genocide on life, and they are losing.

Now, her blades have a date with that knight.


	3. NIGHTMARE: The Saint

He was your friend, wasn't he?

Mentor. Confidante.

Where he struck, you followed.

The Eliksni surround you. Closing in. If he falls, you fall. If you fall, the city falls.

He saves your life. With the void in hand he crushes them, destroys them, annihilates them. They fall, instead. With the Traveler at his back, far in the distance, his name is no more appropriate than it is now.

Somewhere, deep inside, somewhere not even the Light can cleanse, you envy him.

You were younger. You didn't know how to clamp down on your emotions, to clasp shut the valve, cease the flow. You let it spill. You let it fester. You let it eat you.

And yet, when he bestows the title of Vanguard upon you, resentment clutches you still. How dare he cast aside the protection of the innocent to chase a man who will be a greater friend than you could ever hope to be?

You were ignorant. For all you had seen, your naivety of existence sullied you. Could it even devour you?

You have learned.

You have made peace.

But an infected wound is oh so hard to heal. And what are we if not amalgamations of our memories?

The Saint marches home, Commander.

Please, reacquaint yourselves.


	4. NIGHTMARE: The Fist

They are little more than embers, but in the fires of your crucible they blaze like the sun.

Her, though? She came to you, hands wrapped in stained bandages, sweat wrenched from her furrowed brow, holding a grin five miles wide.

She came to you the ominous drumming of thunder.

You turned her into a hurricane.

To her enemies she was doom writ human. A shockwave that charred to the bone. To her friends, the energy that powered the light within. The laughter in silent memories. The camaraderie of the innermost sanctum.

She moved mountains in your name. The city's name. Love's name.

You have lost so many friends.

When the Moon beckoned with a lurid wail and a knife hidden in the dark, she was the first to answer the call. An army of thousands came with her.

Crota ate them.

For all the Light gave her she was left a dead husk on an even deader rock.

You have lost so many. Commendable you've survived them all. Is it not your burden to bear, to carry on their legacy within your molten forge?

What would you do if you needn't bear that burden ever again?

We all have cracks, my Lord, and we all refuse to acknowledge just how deep they run.

Let her fill them in.

Never lose again.


End file.
